A blog about a busy stay at home Mum of four, with too many dresses and not enough wine!

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MY BLOG

An honest account of being a stay at home Mum of four boys. I hope to blog about the highs and lows, parenting, financial issues, budgeting, depression, panic attacks, weight struggles, weight loss, maintaining a 4st weight loss, funny stories, empty nest syndrome and much more. I would love to hear from all of you ... Thanks for reading!

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Stay at home Mum of four boys.
J aged 18, W aged 15, S aged 11 and T aged 7
Married to P for 15 years
I have a degree in History from the Open University and a Certificate of Higher Education in Hotel and Catering Management from Oxford Brookes.
I have a near on addiction to 50s style dresses, champagne and diet coke. I also love making people laugh, even if it means making a fool of myself in the process ...

Recent Posts

Being a Stay at home Mum

Standard

I’ve just written a post, where I mention the frustration of having a good idea for a blog and then having no idea how to go about actually writing it. So I may as well confess, I’m stuck! I have been meaning to write this post for a few months now but as yet …. So I decided to just sit down and write, but as you can see I’m waffling on about writers block and as yet haven’t even mentioned being a stay at home Mum (SAHM) I wanted to write a post on what I do as a SAHM, my ‘job’ if you like?

I thought if I just started writing the words would somehow come tumbling out and yet, still nothing. The problem is two fold, firstly I do so many different things in a day it would be hard to quantify and secondly I guess if I’m completely honest with you, I worry that people will read this post and think ‘that’s all you do?’ I loathe the age old battle of the SAHM v the working Mum, I’ve even blogged about it, but unfortunately it still exists. I have had many, seemingly innocuous, comments over the nineteen years that I have been doing this. They usually go along the lines of ‘You’re a stay at home Mum, it must be lovely to have so much time on your hands.’ I try to be a decent person and not bop them on the head whilst screaming, ‘time what time?!’ before being carted off by the men in white coats, a dribbling wreck.

Although even if the above scenario really did happen, I would probably be imploring the driver of the ambulance to stop off at the supermarket, on the way to the hospital for broken Mum’s, as I have nothing to put in the boys packed lunches tomorrow. Then if we could just squeeze in a quick trip home first, so I can put a quick load of washing in the machine and pick up little Jimmy’s swimming kit; because for the fourth week in a row he has left it in a mouldering heap under his bed, unwashed from the previous weeks swimming trip. Whilst we are there please excuse the pile of unwashed dishes, it may be the twenty first century but we still can’t afford a dish washer and dinner for six people creates a lot of mess.

I think I would have to be sedated with a mega dose of Valium, before I could forget all the whirling thoughts about my children, the house and my never ending ‘to do list.’ Come to think of it I should probably stop writing about enforced stays in hospitals, because it is starting to sound like my idea of heaven! Don’t get me wrong I love being a SAHM, but there are times when I get very frustrated/fed-up/bored of it. As the above paragraph might have given you a tiny hint, I also sometimes struggle to keep up with everything and free time is most certainly not a given.

So what do I do all day? Well I won’t give you a detailed account, because I find my life pretty boring at times and I wouldn’t want to share that boredom with other poor unsuspecting souls. In a nut shell there is a huge amount of cooking and cleaning, even the amount of dust six people can create is alarming. Not to mention the fact that I have to wash 42 pairs of socks every week and don’t get me started on what 5 boys in one household can do to a bathroom. My load has lessened recently as my eldest is now at university. That said he arrived home the other day with a huge suitcase full of dirty washing.

I also take my Husband’s Grandmother to the hairdressers and do her shopping at Marks and Spencers. I’m now quite adept at elbowing the blue rinse brigade out of the way, in my dive for the last piece of reduced salmon. I wonder if I could put that on my C.V.? I’m also a keen ebayer, in fact almost all of our clothes shopping is done online and the majority is from ebay. I can dress the boys in Joules and Mini Boden for less than I would spend on clothes from Asda. W prefers Jack Wills and Ralph Lauren and for me, I buy my beloved fifties style dresses in the wrong season at a fraction of the usual price and sell them on again after a few months. In effect I rent my wardrobe, a great way of always having gorgeous dresses.

This takes up a lot of time, I’m brilliant at finding hidden bargains and dressing us all in great clothes on a budget but it requires patience and a steely nerve. I must resist all temptation not to go above budget and not to cry for too long if I miss out on a gorgeous Hell Bunny dress, five sobs per dress is my maximum.

The faint hearted might want to skip the next few lines, but I promised honesty on this blog …. Annoyingly a lot of my time is spent on the loo these days and to say that is frustrating would be an understatement. IBS and all it’s embarrassing foibles is probably best saved for another post; but if my postman happens to be reading this please save my ebay parcel delivery for the afternoon, how you always manage to ring the doorbell whilst I’m on the loo, I will never know.

Then there is the small business of moving house. We are in the process of moving for the second time in 8 months and the 8th time in 8 years! i’m sensing that 8 is not my lucky number. This house is great but has chronic damp to the point that all of our bedroom furniture and our living room bookcases have turned an alarming shade of blue/green due to the spectacular amounts of mould found growing on the back. More alarmingly W’s asthma has gotten so much worse since we moved in here. Needless to say moving takes a large amount of time, sometimes I feel I am constantly either packing or unpacking. On the plus side we have very little clutter, I am ruthless about getting rid of it, less to pack!

I could go on and on about my life as a SAHM, suffice to say every Mum has so very much to juggle and goodness only knows how working Mums manage to stay on top of everything. I’m running out of time for blogging, so I will end this post with a small plea. Ask me about my IBS, my weight, even my age but please don’t ask me about my free time. I promise not to bop you on the head, I’m a passive girl, but I can’t promise not to start dribbling all over you.

My goal with this blog is to offend everyone in the world at least once with my words… so no one has a reason to have a heightened sense of themselves. We are all ignorant, we are all found wanting, we are all bad people sometimes.